The same increase in sea water temperature could be countered by a similar increase in air temperature.
If the ground goes up 5degK then the stratosphere is not also going to go up 5degK. What your suggesting is the basic heat engine of hurricanes would be altered but the cold side of that heat sink is space not just cold air. Even in the middle of the day the sun is not really heating the upper atmosphere directly so when there is a huge heat sink (like the ocean) on the ground it's not that important if it's day or night. (Yea water vapor is heated in the day but the basic heat engine is not really affected by it that much.)
Look all I am pointing out is there is a reason why there is a heat gradient to the air above and beyond the simple less pressure = lower temperature thing. Which is not going to change as you increase green house gasses.
PS: Overall energy is less important as you increase overall temperature / energy. Yes the sun is dumping the same energy into the system but hurricanes operate on stored energy, which goes up with temperature.
I think the brain uses a "refresh" cycle to keep memories around for longer periods of time. Basically when you think about something you can then re encode that thought as a memory and thus make more copies of that memory. Thus, important moments like your fist kiss stay strong while the names of your High School friends become ever harder to recall.
This would be above and beyond the basic process where specific bonds grow stronger as you keep using them. The idea is that you don't want to lose an important skill or forget where you buried the treasure just because a single cell died.
So if you lived to be 300 you would probably forget the names of your coworkers in over your first 100 years but that seems normal to people as they grow older they tend to forget unimportant things.
I am not the above poster but...
Archaic 1. also Archaic Of, relating to, or characteristic of a much earlier, often more primitive period, especially one that develops into a classical stage of civilization: an archaic bronze statuette; Archaic Greece.
Linux is realy stuck with most of the old UNIX mindset which could be removed. You can take low level C networking code written in 1970 and compile it in a 2005 OS which may or may not be a good thing but do we need to keep that stuff? I am not saying that Windows is great or anything but both windows and OS X decided to drop suport for some Archaic interfaces to promote security ect. So it might be a usefull idea.
I am not saying Linux is bad just that it is stuck in an Archaic minset. Which is realy obvious when you look at low level stuff like how threads communicate with each other. I think it would be good to build an OS from the ground up which would work well in a system that had a Cell CPU, a G5, a P4, and an Athlon 64. I am not saying you need to have it run on such a system but an OS that could thrive in such an enviernment is probly not built using 1960's ideas.
Hell UNIX was built when people thought it was ok to trust the network. *NIX securty is more about patching all the problems with C code than it is about preventing those type of problems in the first place. You can't get a buffer over flow in JAVA. Can we do the same thing as part of the core os? Can we make it so drivers can't crash the system? How about leting users controwl the level of such protection so it's avalible by default but could be removed if you want a little more speed ect. How much faster are networks now than in the last ~40 years? How much faster are CPU's in the last ~40 years? When you compare the comutational power of a GPU vs CPU you can see how much faster you can make things when you solve todays problems and forget about how things used to work.
I am not saying that LINUX is bad just that it's built based on assumptions made a long time ago.
Re:If this were true, why no Mexican H1Bs?
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
There are Mexican H1B's but H1B is just one of many "guest worker" programs. Indian workers are better at English than Mexicans (on average) and they tend to have a higher education level. India has a much higher population than Mexico but it's harder for them to get to the US so we are getting a much smaller but better skilled slice of their work force.
I don't have exact numbers on hand feel free to look them up and correct me but India has something like 20x Mexico's population and they still send us fewer people. So while we do get some Mexican doctors to show up legally the fact that we let people come to harvest crops for a few months and then send them back really alters the average level of people we are getting.
PS: I don't know if you have ever walked though a soup kitchen but a lot of those people are not capable of having a job. Of those that are capable, many of them do work some of the time, but it's hard to get a job when you start out on the street so they are often working under the table for vary low pay. And the illegals tend to cluster more. With several people in the same apartment they are still "poor" but they are more capable of getting by on that level of income. Overall a lot of people go from soup kitchen to working poor but a lot of people fall from poor to soup kitchen status but the people that spend little time as workers tend to be incapable of working.
When your "poor" your not realy mobile, because if your walking around on the street you don't have money to take a bus ect.
Re:If this were true, why no Mexican H1Bs?
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
There are more legal temporary Mexican workers than Indian.
Having RTFA I wonder how much of the "Duh this has to be true" concept effected their research. They seem to focus mostly on jobs title vs. looking at years of experience or education vs. pay. I think there would be more value in comparing people with the same relative experience who got their final degree be it BS, MS, or PHD from the same school to each other before saying.
"Abuse is by far more common than legitimate use,"
PS: This might be true but I think this has more to do with H1B's being less mobile as far as switching jobs than outright abuse vs. US citizens.
When you look at failures there is something of a "fractal" nature to it. Failures tend to spread around specific events like power up / down, excess heat, excess usage ect. So after a month of burn in you see things tend to cluster around events like "summer" and High Usage / heat in the afternoon - evening and backups. So that over the average day there is a specific high failure times and around the year there is also specific high failure times with some random events thrown in like major power outages or expanded capacity > next burn in.
I do know people that prescreen movies. (Or did at one point.) One guy used to buy B movies like Anaconda on DVD's that the had never seen because it looked "cool" and kept getting burned. Now I think he mostly uses a DVR to pick stuff off of HBO, but for a while he started downloading DVIX movies (700MB) and then buying the DVD if he liked them. He was one of those people who could never remember to take movies back to a renal store and was pissed when DIVX (DVD's the rental DVD's) never took off.
Now I tend to go to the movies a lot vs. buying DVD's and I don't mind wasting 6$ on a shitty movie, but when your spending 20+$ a pop it's starts to add up fast and when you have a ton of movies you don't watch sitting there it start's to eat at people.
On a side note a lot of people seemed to do this with Anime because you could not rent them (pre Netflix) and there where not on HBO, so it's hard to tell if they where wasting 25$ on crap.
I think people object to paying for movies on the basis that they watch "free" low quality content by watching TV so they feel a movie must be better than the average TV show before it's worth paying for. Granted you do need to put up with commercials but even watching commercials is somewhat interesting. (The first few times anyway)
Based on this line of thinking people feel they should be able to watch most movies on the cheep and only pay for the ones that are "good". Thus a movie like "Doom" might be mildly interesting but it's not worth a 4$ rental so why not pirate it. However, you don't get to know if a movie is worth paying for or waiting for before you watch it, so people justify pirating most movies as long as they "buy" a few of the ones they like.
50km is only 1/640th of the way to the orbit of 32,000km and you need to get close to 32,000km up before you reach orbital speeds.
So while it might seem like a good idea to use a ballon for lift your gain is so tiny it's not realy worth it. As your wasting a lot of effert to save ~0.2% of your energy costs. Afterall, the cable now needs to deal with all the drag from wind hitting a ballon that can lift ~50tuns at ~50M/s. So it's not going let you make the cable any lighter.
PS: there might be some value in a ballon that is attached to the cable but it's probably of little real value.
Or, you can do use the hole "What does {***} say", where {***) is a picture of some word.
The problem with such systems is page rank is fairly sensitive so 1000 blog act's would still let you noticeably alter a page ranks so a spammer could can setup up a ~1000 accounts in an afternoon (3per min over 6 hours). Thus, if they can make a few 100$ from doing so it's still worth it.
Your system has a similar problem. If someone steals a few thousand Credit Card #'s it's hard to use them in a way that will not get tracked back to them, but if they can use them to setup a few thousand blog's they can step around your system. To create some accounts that they can sell to a spammer.
Basically, anything that makes your system more secure increases the value a spammer would receive from having an account on your system. So at best you can setup a black market for accounts on your system with a cost per act that keeps most spammers from using your system.
While the Shuttle has been a reasonably successful launch vehicle, it has been unable to meet its goal of radically reducing flight launch costs, as the average launch expenditures during its operations up to 2005 accumulates to $1.3 billion [3], a rather large figure compared to the initial projections of $10 to $20 million. The total cost of the program has been $145 billion as of early 2005 ($112 billion of which was incurred while the program was operational) and is estimated at $174 billion when the Shuttle retires in 2010. NASA's budget for 2005 allocates 30%, or $5 billion, to Space Shuttle operations. [4]
1.3 billion * 4 = 5.2billion. vs. 1.32billion * 3 giving 1.3 billion to build 3 Hubble. Now as you already have the basic design for the first one all you would be doing is a little R&D to fix the thing 400million per additional Hubble sounds reasonable. And you get to avoid all the time spent training astronauts how to fix the thing.
Umm, no. The earth is spinning a lot faster than the moon's orbit so tidal drag increases the distance between the earth and the moon by about 2 inches per year as all that energy is converted to orbital velocity and heat. Once the earth slows down enough gravitational waves might cause the system to decay over time but for now the moon's orbit is increasing.
Basically, it's much cheaper to send up a new satellite than it is to send the shuttle up to fix them. Do we send a 250,000 pound shuttle into orbit or a 20 ton satellite?
It would have been cheaper to send up 3 Hubble replacements into orbit using the shuttle than it was to repair the old one. Just think of each of those missions as 1BILLION $ down the drain. OR we could have send ~6 Hubble's up in a non man launch vehicle.
Now sending people into zero G for months at a time has value, but there is little value in sending up a shuttle when what we really want to do is replace a few parts on a satellite. What would have been useful would be to develop a remote controlled repair robot that we could send into orbit with all the devices needed to fix these satellites. With a good design we could use some ION drives and get the thing to pick up the needed pieces to repair a satellite and then fly by and repair them. You might think people are going to be more dexterous than such a ship but in with the gloves these people uses they don't really have much manual dexterity.
Even if such a system where 1/2 the weight of the shuttle the extended stay in space coupled with a more efficient drive system would make for huge cost savings. Even if it took 5x as long to do a repair it would still be a lot cheaper than sending people to do such simple jobs. And if one of them blows up it might make page 6 news vs. setting back the space program several years.
If you where 100th your height you would be ~1/100^2 as strong but ~ 1/100^3 as light thus if you could jump 1 foot in the air now you could still jump ~1 foot into the air even though you where only ~2cm tall. (Ignoring things like wind resistance ect.) It's funny but if the "Honey I shrunk the kids" thing really happened they would have been a lot stronger than any of the insects they came into contact with. When you start scaling the human body down you find that it's incredibly strong for it's size (~2m tall) which is why insects don't get more than about 1 foot in size.
PS: However the basic strictures of the human body don't scale down to that size, in the real world, which is why mammals tend to be at least 2inches long when full grown.
As for the people-holding-mirrors theory, try holding a ~1kg ~1m^2 sheet of perf-board with a laser pointer mounted in the center aimed inside a 10x10cm target that is 10m away... chances are that your aim will wander quite a bit even if you do not have anyone else's beam to get confused with.
People with a good spotting scope people can hit human sized targets at over 1 mile. They do this by using a scope and not the beam to find the target in the same way you can build a simple 'scope' to achieve a high level of accuracy with a signaling mirror. Your 10cm target is 1/100 - 1/200th the size of my 1-4m^2 target at 300m, but it's sill easy to hit if you use a prone position aka brace it on something and a simple 'scope'. And don't forget you don't need everyone to hit the target I was assuming 20% efficiency but a reasonable metallic mirror is about 90% efficient so there is already a large margin of error built in for simple accuracy. If you only get 200 to 1 focus on a 1-foot area (basic bell curve around the target with ~50% of the people at +/- 2 feet accuracy and everyone else off target) it's still going to combust. The average stove burner is something like 1kw and I am talking about ~20x that much energy over the same area. It's going to get vary hot vary fast. If you keep the bean on target for 15 - 30 seconds it's going to burn. And all that extra energy around the target is not going to be wasted as it's going to help the fire spread to a wide area vary quickly.
Try putting out burning oil with water... it does not work since the burning oil floats on top of water and keeps on burning there until it burns out or is snuffed out by other means.
You don't need to put the fire out only to keep your ship from going up in smoke. If you take a piece of plywood and cover it with oil and set the oil on fire it's easy to keep the plywood from burning by dumping a little water every once in a while and even though the oil still burns the fire goes out fairly fast while doing little to the wood. The point is that yes there is some burning oil over a 4 or 5m^2 area but it's not going to burn for long, and it's not going to be all that hot (not all that much oxygen to the center of the fire). So all you need to do is keep everything else from burning and until the fire goes out from lack of fuel fairly fast. The only reason why most ships where easy to burn was all that rigging, but as they don't need to go fast so can take all that down before getting inside range of such weapons. You have a lot of people on board so you can easily row the last few 100m, it's not like it's a race to see how fast you can show up even 1/2 mph is plenty fast for this type of operation.
On an actual sea, ships move along all degrees of freedom thanks to waves, winds and oars, making accurate target tracking a major challenge.
Ok, 1m/s ~= 2MPH but it's easy to track even a fast moving object 20x that fast at 300m. I mean there is a guy at every shield looking though his sight at your ship and it's not like they change directions all that fast. Thus, it's only the vertical motion from the waves that really all that random but even that is not going to dispace a ship all that fast and it's not that random so it's easy to track. Don't forget people can hit human sized targets at 300m with a bow and arrow while on horse back running at full speed. A reasonably calm bay is not going to move the ships all that fast. And even then let's say you spend 30 seconds to set a ship on fire you can still take out their fleet in something like 15 min.
There is no historic proof that "Archimedes' Death Ray" ever existed.
I am not saying he built it only that he could build such a thing. If he really made such a simple device it would probably have been copied and used more than once, unless they kept it secret due to is weak nature in non optimal conditions. I mean it's not that useful as you would need to use it on su
There are people on the boats so if you just dump a large flammable object onto a ship it it's easy for someone to dump a bucket from the sea on it.
However, if you have 500 * 1m^2 mirros at 20% effecency your talking about 100,000 watts of power over ~1-4m^2 area which could easly burn people and set riggin ect on fire. And once the fire started they could have kept extending it to ever larger areas of a ship before moving on to the next one. So while the might have been able to keep enough watter on hand to extingush most fires it would be much harder to stop an attack like this.
From what I understand most quality developers tend to be of a reasonably liberal mindset and want to avoid Texas. (By liberal I mean open-minded. I know several awesome coders that are Libertarians, but I can't think of any rightwing...)
"Everyone else seems to need work, and they simply can't find any"
I think this goes back to the Texas issue to some extent, but a lot of this has to do with the rather specific sill sets requirements most company's have before hiring someone for a position.
I once overhead a production bug with some Cold Fusion code while nobody in the office knew any Cold Fusion so I asked to see the code. After looking at it I quickly figured out the basic syntax, found the bug, and fixed it. All of this took somewhere around 2-3 hours after which I was tasked with several 'Bugs' and a few 'Enhancements' with little more than a book and a few web sights to guide me. Yet, if they went looking for someone to do that job they would have paced a requirement of '1-2 years Cold Fusion experience' and 'A solid web development background including JavaScript' ect.
At 25 I have ~3 years professional experience, but I have world with a wide verity of tools. I have used Java, HTML, SQL, ASM, C, C++, Visual C++, Pascal, Object Pascal (It's an old Mac language), Basic (several variants), Cold Fusion, Fortran, and some more I am probably forgetting. I have written multithreaded networking code for Windows, Mac, and UNIX, and lots of websites ect. But, looking for a new job it seems like everyone seems to want me to have spend all my time using the exact same tools they currently use to solve just the type of problems they are working with. So for right now I think the best option is to start my own company on the side as I world for these guys for right now. The pay is a little low (46k) and they give me flexible hours, interesting work, and respect that I am not going to give them 80-hour workweeks on what they are paying me. Hell I can probably ask for a raise, but I like being underpaid in the since that it gives me more leverage to have free time.
It's funny, but they seem to use me like some sort of Senior Computing Guru and like the fact they can give me just about any problem in any langue and I will give the a solution in a reasonable time frame. But it's mostly because they keep hiring incompetent people and they keep losing those with any real skills. As an example of just how incompetent we are talking about I was recently asked to find out why someone's code was so slow and after reading over the basic structure I found out that they where doing a 'like' query on 200,000 row table without any indexes. So I altered the table, which was updated once a month, to add some indexes and guess what it ended up something like 30x as fast because such things are important. Now the sad part was not that none of the people involved with this project failed to recognize that the table needed indexing so much as the fact that none of them had a clue as to why it might be slow or how to go about finding out what was slow.
So my advice is to look for quality people independent of skill set and create an environment where they want to work for you. Pay is only one aspect of why someone would work for you, and if you want talented people you need to realize that we can make 80k at a shit job anywhere but most of us realize that enjoying your job is far more important than most people seem to think.
PS: If your doing interesting work I would be happy to move to Texas for a significantly better job, but starting this company is placing restraints on how much overtime I can put into a day job. This is not to say I am looking for a better job as to point out you can get quality people if you have a good reputation and are willing to get creative in both the types of compensation you give and the methods you go about looking for them.
It's "less than half the current time of a Concorde." but the Concorde in not in service so it ends up as 6 hours vs (12 * 2) = 24 hours in a plane. So there saving 18 hours of flight time.
For a consultant at 100$/h * 18h we are talking about 1800$ in savings each way so could easly be worth it, if they charge less than that or the consultant is charging more than that. And hell we charge more than that for mid level teck support let alone sending a somone important. (And yes if we are sending somone 1/2 way around the world we are going to start charging from the second they leave the office untill they solve the problem.)
Lot's of networks use TCP/IP that are not part of the Internet but everything on the Internet uses TCP/IP which was invented in the US. 'The Internet' is just a specific large network that communicates using TCP/IP. Thus, 'The Internet' was invented in the US.
Repeat after me 'The internet' is just a network. Sure other places have added innovations on top of that network, but when you talk about 'The Internet' your really only talking about the network on top of which people send all those packets.
Anyway, 'The Internet' and DNS (which is what this is really about) have little to do with each other. DNS is just another protocol sitting on top the network. The funny thing is if you where to turn off these 'core' servers that the UN is complaining about not much would happen. All there data is cashed on other systems around the world and the UN could easily setup UN-DNS with all the correct data with little difficulty. The way I see it if they knew what they where talking about they would know it's not really an issue. However, as they clearly don't have a clue what there talking about they should leave it the fuck alone.
PS: HTML is just SGML (invented in the US) with a few extra tag definitions. "1989: Tim Berners-Lee invents the Web with HTML as its publishing language" He basically extended SGML to include a hypertext tag (already established as a concept by academics as early as the 1940s).
Vint Cerf did his part, but it's silly to say the Internet would not have had hypertext without him. Hell, I know someone that was on the STML standards committee that wanted to add that feature but it kept getting shot down...
'The study o'... 'expectancy. ' was an attempt to define the terms 'Ethics', 'The study of Ethics' and 'Morals' in a clear and explicit fashion. It might have been excessive but I it's easy to 'ague' about two completely different things in text based communication systems so I like to be clear.
but that doesn't mean that the ends, alone, justify the means. You are making the assumption that there is a correct ethical system. There is a wide verity of ethical systems that are inherently consistent (Aka they don't have internal contradictions) but are vary inconsistent with each other. As I recall in early Mesopotamia there was a law where if you built a house that fell down and killed the son of person who you built the house for then your son would be killed. Harming someone who is uninvolved with the incident as punishment might seem strange to us but it can still work as part of a system of ethics.
Come to think of it Ethical systems don't have to be consistent to be used. So you can study systems that use variations on 'the end justifies the means' concept even when that seems to contradict other parts of the system.
All these thousands of years that people have been trying to state "the problem with philosophy", and you think you got it in a sentence?
Yep. "I think therefore I am." Vs. "Nope. You don't think or exist everything is random." and there is no way to judge which is correct. Or to paraphrase what Thomas Aquinas said "Philosophy s a house built on sand."
So you agree that science is a subset of philosophy? No, western thought is not the same thing as Philosophy. When early astronomers started using circles within circles within circles to define motions of the planets and someone said 'that's not a useful approach let's uses a model other than circles to define planetary motion' he was not creating a subset of the circles within circles idea. Science is built from bits and pieces of math, history, logic, and Philosophy but it's not a subset of any of them. It is a separate discipline unto its self. EX: Philosophers and Historians don't have any concept of 'Peer review before publication'.
If not...without establishing what you're inspecting when you inspect the "real world"
I don't need to define gravity to walk. I don't need to understand chemistry to set something on fire. Most people assume there is a real world and don't bother trying to define what that means.
Science is built on a few basic assumptions that are far less limited than most people think they are. EX: 'There is an unchanging rule set that defines the actions of everything within reality.' If there where a God then the unchanging rules set might be 'things operate as god wills them'. See the idea works if there is a God and it works if there is no god. If the 'world' as we know it where a computer simulation then the unchanging rule set would apply to the world outside that game and though that world it would set what was possible in the game. If the universe is truly random then the rule set is 'Anything can happen'. If there is only one reality and the speed of light changes as reality ages then a rule would be 'Speed of light = some function of(age of reality)' ect.
There are some assumptions about how experiments demonstrate things to some probability, but experiments don't try to prove things. None of this is based on the idea that anything is ever 'true'. The assumption is that the more you run an experiment that confirms your theory the more you can trust the accuracy of that theory as it apply's to that experiment. I could go on, but you can see why I would say that none of this is based on Philosophy in the since that none of what you do when you do science is based on what you do when you do Philosophy.
Philosophy might be the study of 'truth' but Science only cares about reasonable levels of accuracy.
First off they ignored / downplayed him instead of actively harassing him. Galileo dealt with people who where unwilling to look at direct evidence, such as the fact the sun is not a perfect sphere even though you can look at his instrument and see that it's not. This guy dealt with people that where looking at evidence that seemed to contradict him and still ended up accepting what he was saying. (If you cut out an ulcer there is no living infection that you can see.)
To have an accepted theory overturned to the point where nobody is debating him in 20 years is a fast turnover when compared with the type of people who still debate evolution.
Slashdot Mirror
The same increase in sea water temperature could be countered by a similar increase in air temperature.
If the ground goes up 5degK then the stratosphere is not also going to go up 5degK. What your suggesting is the basic heat engine of hurricanes would be altered but the cold side of that heat sink is space not just cold air. Even in the middle of the day the sun is not really heating the upper atmosphere directly so when there is a huge heat sink (like the ocean) on the ground it's not that important if it's day or night. (Yea water vapor is heated in the day but the basic heat engine is not really affected by it that much.)
Look all I am pointing out is there is a reason why there is a heat gradient to the air above and beyond the simple less pressure = lower temperature thing. Which is not going to change as you increase green house gasses.
PS: Overall energy is less important as you increase overall temperature / energy. Yes the sun is dumping the same energy into the system but hurricanes operate on stored energy, which goes up with temperature.
I think the brain uses a "refresh" cycle to keep memories around for longer periods of time. Basically when you think about something you can then re encode that thought as a memory and thus make more copies of that memory. Thus, important moments like your fist kiss stay strong while the names of your High School friends become ever harder to recall.
This would be above and beyond the basic process where specific bonds grow stronger as you keep using them. The idea is that you don't want to lose an important skill or forget where you buried the treasure just because a single cell died.
So if you lived to be 300 you would probably forget the names of your coworkers in over your first 100 years but that seems normal to people as they grow older they tend to forget unimportant things.
I am not the above poster but...
Archaic 1. also Archaic Of, relating to, or characteristic of a much earlier, often more primitive period, especially one that develops into a classical stage of civilization: an archaic bronze statuette; Archaic Greece.
Linux is realy stuck with most of the old UNIX mindset which could be removed. You can take low level C networking code written in 1970 and compile it in a 2005 OS which may or may not be a good thing but do we need to keep that stuff? I am not saying that Windows is great or anything but both windows and OS X decided to drop suport for some Archaic interfaces to promote security ect. So it might be a usefull idea.
I am not saying Linux is bad just that it is stuck in an Archaic minset. Which is realy obvious when you look at low level stuff like how threads communicate with each other. I think it would be good to build an OS from the ground up which would work well in a system that had a Cell CPU, a G5, a P4, and an Athlon 64. I am not saying you need to have it run on such a system but an OS that could thrive in such an enviernment is probly not built using 1960's ideas.
Hell UNIX was built when people thought it was ok to trust the network. *NIX securty is more about patching all the problems with C code than it is about preventing those type of problems in the first place. You can't get a buffer over flow in JAVA. Can we do the same thing as part of the core os? Can we make it so drivers can't crash the system? How about leting users controwl the level of such protection so it's avalible by default but could be removed if you want a little more speed ect. How much faster are networks now than in the last ~40 years? How much faster are CPU's in the last ~40 years? When you compare the comutational power of a GPU vs CPU you can see how much faster you can make things when you solve todays problems and forget about how things used to work.
I am not saying that LINUX is bad just that it's built based on assumptions made a long time ago.
There are Mexican H1B's but H1B is just one of many "guest worker" programs. Indian workers are better at English than Mexicans (on average) and they tend to have a higher education level. India has a much higher population than Mexico but it's harder for them to get to the US so we are getting a much smaller but better skilled slice of their work force.
I don't have exact numbers on hand feel free to look them up and correct me but India has something like 20x Mexico's population and they still send us fewer people. So while we do get some Mexican doctors to show up legally the fact that we let people come to harvest crops for a few months and then send them back really alters the average level of people we are getting.
PS: I don't know if you have ever walked though a soup kitchen but a lot of those people are not capable of having a job. Of those that are capable, many of them do work some of the time, but it's hard to get a job when you start out on the street so they are often working under the table for vary low pay. And the illegals tend to cluster more. With several people in the same apartment they are still "poor" but they are more capable of getting by on that level of income. Overall a lot of people go from soup kitchen to working poor but a lot of people fall from poor to soup kitchen status but the people that spend little time as workers tend to be incapable of working.
When your "poor" your not realy mobile, because if your walking around on the street you don't have money to take a bus ect.
There are more legal temporary Mexican workers than Indian.
Having RTFA I wonder how much of the "Duh this has to be true" concept effected their research. They seem to focus mostly on jobs title vs. looking at years of experience or education vs. pay. I think there would be more value in comparing people with the same relative experience who got their final degree be it BS, MS, or PHD from the same school to each other before saying.
"Abuse is by far more common than legitimate use,"
PS: This might be true but I think this has more to do with H1B's being less mobile as far as switching jobs than outright abuse vs. US citizens.
When you look at failures there is something of a "fractal" nature to it. Failures tend to spread around specific events like power up / down, excess heat, excess usage ect. So after a month of burn in you see things tend to cluster around events like "summer" and High Usage / heat in the afternoon - evening and backups. So that over the average day there is a specific high failure times and around the year there is also specific high failure times with some random events thrown in like major power outages or expanded capacity > next burn in.
I do know people that prescreen movies. (Or did at one point.) One guy used to buy B movies like Anaconda on DVD's that the had never seen because it looked "cool" and kept getting burned. Now I think he mostly uses a DVR to pick stuff off of HBO, but for a while he started downloading DVIX movies (700MB) and then buying the DVD if he liked them. He was one of those people who could never remember to take movies back to a renal store and was pissed when DIVX (DVD's the rental DVD's) never took off.
Now I tend to go to the movies a lot vs. buying DVD's and I don't mind wasting 6$ on a shitty movie, but when your spending 20+$ a pop it's starts to add up fast and when you have a ton of movies you don't watch sitting there it start's to eat at people.
On a side note a lot of people seemed to do this with Anime because you could not rent them (pre Netflix) and there where not on HBO, so it's hard to tell if they where wasting 25$ on crap.
I think people object to paying for movies on the basis that they watch "free" low quality content by watching TV so they feel a movie must be better than the average TV show before it's worth paying for. Granted you do need to put up with commercials but even watching commercials is somewhat interesting. (The first few times anyway)
Based on this line of thinking people feel they should be able to watch most movies on the cheep and only pay for the ones that are "good". Thus a movie like "Doom" might be mildly interesting but it's not worth a 4$ rental so why not pirate it. However, you don't get to know if a movie is worth paying for or waiting for before you watch it, so people justify pirating most movies as long as they "buy" a few of the ones they like.
50km is only 1 /640th of the way to the orbit of 32,000km and you need to get close to 32,000km up before you reach orbital speeds.
So while it might seem like a good idea to use a ballon for lift your gain is so tiny it's not realy worth it. As your wasting a lot of effert to save ~0.2% of your energy costs. Afterall, the cable now needs to deal with all the drag from wind hitting a ballon that can lift ~50tuns at ~50M/s. So it's not going let you make the cable any lighter.
PS: there might be some value in a ballon that is attached to the cable but it's probably of little real value.
Or, you can do use the hole "What does {***} say", where {***) is a picture of some word.
The problem with such systems is page rank is fairly sensitive so 1000 blog act's would still let you noticeably alter a page ranks so a spammer could can setup up a ~1000 accounts in an afternoon (3per min over 6 hours). Thus, if they can make a few 100$ from doing so it's still worth it.
Your system has a similar problem. If someone steals a few thousand Credit Card #'s it's hard to use them in a way that will not get tracked back to them, but if they can use them to setup a few thousand blog's they can step around your system. To create some accounts that they can sell to a spammer.
Basically, anything that makes your system more secure increases the value a spammer would receive from having an account on your system. So at best you can setup a black market for accounts on your system with a cost per act that keeps most spammers from using your system.
I think the implication was most of them where gifts.
While the Shuttle has been a reasonably successful launch vehicle, it has been unable to meet its goal of radically reducing flight launch costs, as the average launch expenditures during its operations up to 2005 accumulates to $1.3 billion [3], a rather large figure compared to the initial projections of $10 to $20 million. The total cost of the program has been $145 billion as of early 2005 ($112 billion of which was incurred while the program was operational) and is estimated at $174 billion when the Shuttle retires in 2010. NASA's budget for 2005 allocates 30%, or $5 billion, to Space Shuttle operations. [4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle
1.3 billion * 4 = 5.2billion. vs. 1.32billion * 3 giving 1.3 billion to build 3 Hubble. Now as you already have the basic design for the first one all you would be doing is a little R&D to fix the thing 400million per additional Hubble sounds reasonable. And you get to avoid all the time spent training astronauts how to fix the thing.
Umm, no. The earth is spinning a lot faster than the moon's orbit so tidal drag increases the distance between the earth and the moon by about 2 inches per year as all that energy is converted to orbital velocity and heat. Once the earth slows down enough gravitational waves might cause the system to decay over time but for now the moon's orbit is increasing.
Basically, it's much cheaper to send up a new satellite than it is to send the shuttle up to fix them. Do we send a 250,000 pound shuttle into orbit or a 20 ton satellite?
It would have been cheaper to send up 3 Hubble replacements into orbit using the shuttle than it was to repair the old one. Just think of each of those missions as 1BILLION $ down the drain. OR we could have send ~6 Hubble's up in a non man launch vehicle.
Now sending people into zero G for months at a time has value, but there is little value in sending up a shuttle when what we really want to do is replace a few parts on a satellite. What would have been useful would be to develop a remote controlled repair robot that we could send into orbit with all the devices needed to fix these satellites. With a good design we could use some ION drives and get the thing to pick up the needed pieces to repair a satellite and then fly by and repair them. You might think people are going to be more dexterous than such a ship but in with the gloves these people uses they don't really have much manual dexterity.
Even if such a system where 1/2 the weight of the shuttle the extended stay in space coupled with a more efficient drive system would make for huge cost savings. Even if it took 5x as long to do a repair it would still be a lot cheaper than sending people to do such simple jobs. And if one of them blows up it might make page 6 news vs. setting back the space program several years.
If you where 100th your height you would be ~1/100^2 as strong but ~ 1/100^3 as light thus if you could jump 1 foot in the air now you could still jump ~1 foot into the air even though you where only ~2cm tall. (Ignoring things like wind resistance ect.) It's funny but if the "Honey I shrunk the kids" thing really happened they would have been a lot stronger than any of the insects they came into contact with. When you start scaling the human body down you find that it's incredibly strong for it's size (~2m tall) which is why insects don't get more than about 1 foot in size.
PS: However the basic strictures of the human body don't scale down to that size, in the real world, which is why mammals tend to be at least 2inches long when full grown.
Where to start...
As for the people-holding-mirrors theory, try holding a ~1kg ~1m^2 sheet of perf-board with a laser pointer mounted in the center aimed inside a 10x10cm target that is 10m away... chances are that your aim will wander quite a bit even if you do not have anyone else's beam to get confused with.
People with a good spotting scope people can hit human sized targets at over 1 mile. They do this by using a scope and not the beam to find the target in the same way you can build a simple 'scope' to achieve a high level of accuracy with a signaling mirror. Your 10cm target is 1/100 - 1/200th the size of my 1-4m^2 target at 300m, but it's sill easy to hit if you use a prone position aka brace it on something and a simple 'scope'. And don't forget you don't need everyone to hit the target I was assuming 20% efficiency but a reasonable metallic mirror is about 90% efficient so there is already a large margin of error built in for simple accuracy. If you only get 200 to 1 focus on a 1-foot area (basic bell curve around the target with ~50% of the people at +/- 2 feet accuracy and everyone else off target) it's still going to combust. The average stove burner is something like 1kw and I am talking about ~20x that much energy over the same area. It's going to get vary hot vary fast. If you keep the bean on target for 15 - 30 seconds it's going to burn. And all that extra energy around the target is not going to be wasted as it's going to help the fire spread to a wide area vary quickly.
Try putting out burning oil with water... it does not work since the burning oil floats on top of water and keeps on burning there until it burns out or is snuffed out by other means.
You don't need to put the fire out only to keep your ship from going up in smoke. If you take a piece of plywood and cover it with oil and set the oil on fire it's easy to keep the plywood from burning by dumping a little water every once in a while and even though the oil still burns the fire goes out fairly fast while doing little to the wood. The point is that yes there is some burning oil over a 4 or 5m^2 area but it's not going to burn for long, and it's not going to be all that hot (not all that much oxygen to the center of the fire). So all you need to do is keep everything else from burning and until the fire goes out from lack of fuel fairly fast. The only reason why most ships where easy to burn was all that rigging, but as they don't need to go fast so can take all that down before getting inside range of such weapons. You have a lot of people on board so you can easily row the last few 100m, it's not like it's a race to see how fast you can show up even 1/2 mph is plenty fast for this type of operation.
On an actual sea, ships move along all degrees of freedom thanks to waves, winds and oars, making accurate target tracking a major challenge.
Ok, 1m/s ~= 2MPH but it's easy to track even a fast moving object 20x that fast at 300m. I mean there is a guy at every shield looking though his sight at your ship and it's not like they change directions all that fast. Thus, it's only the vertical motion from the waves that really all that random but even that is not going to dispace a ship all that fast and it's not that random so it's easy to track. Don't forget people can hit human sized targets at 300m with a bow and arrow while on horse back running at full speed. A reasonably calm bay is not going to move the ships all that fast. And even then let's say you spend 30 seconds to set a ship on fire you can still take out their fleet in something like 15 min.
There is no historic proof that "Archimedes' Death Ray" ever existed.
I am not saying he built it only that he could build such a thing. If he really made such a simple device it would probably have been copied and used more than once, unless they kept it secret due to is weak nature in non optimal conditions. I mean it's not that useful as you would need to use it on su
There are people on the boats so if you just dump a large flammable object onto a ship it it's easy for someone to dump a bucket from the sea on it.
However, if you have 500 * 1m^2 mirros at 20% effecency your talking about 100,000 watts of power over ~1-4m^2 area which could easly burn people and set riggin ect on fire. And once the fire started they could have kept extending it to ever larger areas of a ship before moving on to the next one. So while the might have been able to keep enough watter on hand to extingush most fires it would be much harder to stop an attack like this.
OPS, Hit Submit not Preview...
O well, sorry about all the the grammer isues.
"Apparently Dallas Texas lacks quality software engineers."
...)
From what I understand most quality developers tend to be of a reasonably liberal mindset and want to avoid Texas. (By liberal I mean open-minded. I know several awesome coders that are Libertarians, but I can't think of any rightwing
"Everyone else seems to need work, and they simply can't find any"
I think this goes back to the Texas issue to some extent, but a lot of this has to do with the rather specific sill sets requirements most company's have before hiring someone for a position.
I once overhead a production bug with some Cold Fusion code while nobody in the office knew any Cold Fusion so I asked to see the code. After looking at it I quickly figured out the basic syntax, found the bug, and fixed it. All of this took somewhere around 2-3 hours after which I was tasked with several 'Bugs' and a few 'Enhancements' with little more than a book and a few web sights to guide me. Yet, if they went looking for someone to do that job they would have paced a requirement of '1-2 years Cold Fusion experience' and 'A solid web development background including JavaScript' ect.
At 25 I have ~3 years professional experience, but I have world with a wide verity of tools. I have used Java, HTML, SQL, ASM, C, C++, Visual C++, Pascal, Object Pascal (It's an old Mac language), Basic (several variants), Cold Fusion, Fortran, and some more I am probably forgetting. I have written multithreaded networking code for Windows, Mac, and UNIX, and lots of websites ect. But, looking for a new job it seems like everyone seems to want me to have spend all my time using the exact same tools they currently use to solve just the type of problems they are working with. So for right now I think the best option is to start my own company on the side as I world for these guys for right now. The pay is a little low (46k) and they give me flexible hours, interesting work, and respect that I am not going to give them 80-hour workweeks on what they are paying me. Hell I can probably ask for a raise, but I like being underpaid in the since that it gives me more leverage to have free time.
It's funny, but they seem to use me like some sort of Senior Computing Guru and like the fact they can give me just about any problem in any langue and I will give the a solution in a reasonable time frame. But it's mostly because they keep hiring incompetent people and they keep losing those with any real skills. As an example of just how incompetent we are talking about I was recently asked to find out why someone's code was so slow and after reading over the basic structure I found out that they where doing a 'like' query on 200,000 row table without any indexes. So I altered the table, which was updated once a month, to add some indexes and guess what it ended up something like 30x as fast because such things are important. Now the sad part was not that none of the people involved with this project failed to recognize that the table needed indexing so much as the fact that none of them had a clue as to why it might be slow or how to go about finding out what was slow.
So my advice is to look for quality people independent of skill set and create an environment where they want to work for you. Pay is only one aspect of why someone would work for you, and if you want talented people you need to realize that we can make 80k at a shit job anywhere but most of us realize that enjoying your job is far more important than most people seem to think.
PS: If your doing interesting work I would be happy to move to Texas for a significantly better job, but starting this company is placing restraints on how much overtime I can put into a day job. This is not to say I am looking for a better job as to point out you can get quality people if you have a good reputation and are willing to get creative in both the types of compensation you give and the methods you go about looking for them.
If the UN wants to redo DNS then they are free to come up with their own protocol.
If they like DNS but don't like the way it's run then they are free to set up their own DNS servers.
However, if they want us to send them our DNS servers then they can go fuck themselves.
It's "less than half the current time of a Concorde." but the Concorde in not in service so it ends up as 6 hours vs (12 * 2) = 24 hours in a plane. So there saving 18 hours of flight time.
/h * 18h we are talking about 1800$ in savings each way so could easly be worth it, if they charge less than that or the consultant is charging more than that. And hell we charge more than that for mid level teck support let alone sending a somone important. (And yes if we are sending somone 1/2 way around the world we are going to start charging from the second they leave the office untill they solve the problem.)
For a consultant at 100$
Lot's of networks use TCP/IP that are not part of the Internet but everything on the Internet uses TCP/IP which was invented in the US. 'The Internet' is just a specific large network that communicates using TCP/IP. Thus, 'The Internet' was invented in the US.
Repeat after me 'The internet' is just a network. Sure other places have added innovations on top of that network, but when you talk about 'The Internet' your really only talking about the network on top of which people send all those packets.
Anyway, 'The Internet' and DNS (which is what this is really about) have little to do with each other. DNS is just another protocol sitting on top the network. The funny thing is if you where to turn off these 'core' servers that the UN is complaining about not much would happen. All there data is cashed on other systems around the world and the UN could easily setup UN-DNS with all the correct data with little difficulty. The way I see it if they knew what they where talking about they would know it's not really an issue. However, as they clearly don't have a clue what there talking about they should leave it the fuck alone.
PS: HTML is just SGML (invented in the US) with a few extra tag definitions. "1989: Tim Berners-Lee invents the Web with HTML as its publishing language" He basically extended SGML to include a hypertext tag (already established as a concept by academics as early as the 1940s).
Vint Cerf did his part, but it's silly to say the Internet would not have had hypertext without him. Hell, I know someone that was on the STML standards committee that wanted to add that feature but it kept getting shot down...
I can't quite tell if you mean to argue.
... 'expectancy. ' was an attempt to define the terms 'Ethics', 'The study of Ethics' and 'Morals' in a clear and explicit fashion. It might have been excessive but I it's easy to 'ague' about two completely different things in text based communication systems so I like to be clear.
'The study o'
but that doesn't mean that the ends, alone, justify the means. You are making the assumption that there is a correct ethical system. There is a wide verity of ethical systems that are inherently consistent (Aka they don't have internal contradictions) but are vary inconsistent with each other. As I recall in early Mesopotamia there was a law where if you built a house that fell down and killed the son of person who you built the house for then your son would be killed. Harming someone who is uninvolved with the incident as punishment might seem strange to us but it can still work as part of a system of ethics.
Come to think of it Ethical systems don't have to be consistent to be used. So you can study systems that use variations on 'the end justifies the means' concept even when that seems to contradict other parts of the system.
All these thousands of years that people have been trying to state "the problem with philosophy", and you think you got it in a sentence?
Yep. "I think therefore I am." Vs. "Nope. You don't think or exist everything is random." and there is no way to judge which is correct. Or to paraphrase what Thomas Aquinas said "Philosophy s a house built on sand."
So you agree that science is a subset of philosophy? No, western thought is not the same thing as Philosophy. When early astronomers started using circles within circles within circles to define motions of the planets and someone said 'that's not a useful approach let's uses a model other than circles to define planetary motion' he was not creating a subset of the circles within circles idea. Science is built from bits and pieces of math, history, logic, and Philosophy but it's not a subset of any of them. It is a separate discipline unto its self. EX: Philosophers and Historians don't have any concept of 'Peer review before publication'.
If not...without establishing what you're inspecting when you inspect the "real world"
I don't need to define gravity to walk. I don't need to understand chemistry to set something on fire. Most people assume there is a real world and don't bother trying to define what that means.
Science is built on a few basic assumptions that are far less limited than most people think they are. EX: 'There is an unchanging rule set that defines the actions of everything within reality.' If there where a God then the unchanging rules set might be 'things operate as god wills them'. See the idea works if there is a God and it works if there is no god. If the 'world' as we know it where a computer simulation then the unchanging rule set would apply to the world outside that game and though that world it would set what was possible in the game. If the universe is truly random then the rule set is 'Anything can happen'. If there is only one reality and the speed of light changes as reality ages then a rule would be 'Speed of light = some function of(age of reality)' ect.
There are some assumptions about how experiments demonstrate things to some probability, but experiments don't try to prove things. None of this is based on the idea that anything is ever 'true'. The assumption is that the more you run an experiment that confirms your theory the more you can trust the accuracy of that theory as it apply's to that experiment. I could go on, but you can see why I would say that none of this is based on Philosophy in the since that none of what you do when you do science is based on what you do when you do Philosophy.
Philosophy might be the study of 'truth' but Science only cares about reasonable levels of accuracy.
First off they ignored / downplayed him instead of actively harassing him. Galileo dealt with people who where unwilling to look at direct evidence, such as the fact the sun is not a perfect sphere even though you can look at his instrument and see that it's not. This guy dealt with people that where looking at evidence that seemed to contradict him and still ended up accepting what he was saying. (If you cut out an ulcer there is no living infection that you can see.)
To have an accepted theory overturned to the point where nobody is debating him in 20 years is a fast turnover when compared with the type of people who still debate evolution.